Announced Thursday by the Japanese government and Robot Taxi Inc., the trial will initially serve about 50 residents in the Kanagawa prefecture, shuttling them between their home and local grocery stores, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Japan will test self-driving taxis on public roads.
In order to navigate the roads, Robot Taxi uses Global Positioning System, millimeter-wave radar, stereo vision cameras and image analysis. Among the attendees was Shinjiro Koizumi, son of former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and a vice minister in the current government.
The company behind it, Robot Taxi, is a joint venture between mobile-internet firm DeNA and vehicle-technology developer ZMP. Running no more than 3 km (roughly 2 miles), the trips will run along major city roads and will be accompanied by crew incase something goes awry.
Toyota’s Estima hybrid minivan has been selected for a retrofit to house the driverless technology, which will hit the streets in 2016.
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Many other companies are developing self-driving vehicles. Google has held similar trials with its own cars and drivers this year, though it didn’t drive members of the public around as part of a commercial service. This would be just in time for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The robot taxi service forms part of the country’s efforts to care for this rapidly ageing population, with interesting ideas like Robear, a robotic bear (yes, really) that can help elderly people out of bed, having already been launched. That number, however, is expected to grow to 40 percent over the next four decades.
